ESSAY – ON RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE

In chronological terms we live in the twenty-first century. But in some contexts many people are still functioning in a bygone era which was characterized by interfaith hurt and anger, passions and persecutions motivated by religious fervor, convictions of free-rides to Heaven after martyrdom, and invocation of God and Satan prior to the perpetration of heinous deeds.

All through the ages the intertwining of politics and religion was more than a scheme by conquering marauders to manipulate and whip up mindless soldiers in the conquest of new lands. Rather, it was born of deep-felt belief, an inner certainty that one’s visions of God and the hereafter constitute the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth, and that all other systems of thought and beliefs on this matter were wrong, pernicious, and deserving of destruction.

There was a time when this mindset did more havoc than arrows, gunpowder, and even cannons, for the power of religion-inspired hate can be more virulent and vicious than weapons of war. We are currently witnessing the unleashing of that power in some regions of world.

Granted, there are political problems to be resolved, economic injustices to be corrected, and moral wrongs to be righted, and lot more things to be done to make this a fairer community of nations. But even in a Utopian world where all may live in abundance, where the arts flourish as much as the sciences, there may not necessarily be happy harmony. Peace cannot reign where doctrinal intolerance persists.

Let me say this first: I have reverence for the symbols and sounds of every religion of the human family in so far as they don’t hurt anyone. Irrespective of how some of their practitioners behave, I respect Judaism as an inspiration from a genuine Covenant with a Higher Power, Buddhism as a call for compassion, Islam as a proclamation of Peace and surrender to God, Christianity as a pulpit for love and caring. I accept that at the core every religion has many positive things to preach.

This acceptance is religious pluralism: Not the abandonment of one’s own faith and the naïve embrace of all, nor the simplistic view that all religions teach the same values or have the same visions, but the feeling and understanding that there is wisdom in every tradition, magnificence is every spiritual aspiration and a sublime core in every religion.

In the current context of religious confrontations, I would like to recall a vision of some ancient Hindu seers in a pluralistic world. The challenge for the religiously inclined is not faith and loyalty to the religion of one’s affiliation, but tolerance of, and respect for other faiths and loyalties. Monotheism is a lofty vision, if the term only implied belief in a single God. Sadly, it often tends to include a condescending corollary: That the One God is the God which I worship. It is an irony of religious history is that there have been more bloody confrontations among monotheistic religions than between any of them and a polytheistic one.

Theologians and leaders of all religions would do well to consider a precious aphorism in the Rig Veda which says it all:

ekam sat; viprá bahudhá vadanti: Truth is one; the learned (the devout)call it by different names.

In Sanskrit the word sat means truth, essence, and also God. God is no other than Ultimate Truth, the quintessence of the Cosmic Totality. Quintessential Truth, however, is infinite, and it can be grasped by finite human minds only in parts. So every description of It, whether from revelation or through speculation, whether from reading or by reflection, can only be partial. So we all proclaim It in many different ways.

One is not right and the other wrong in this matter, we all obtain glimpses of the Ultimate. Truth about the Ultimate is like the glitter of a gem, it shines in different ways when viewed from different angles. For the enlightened heart and mind, God can be seen in the Star of David as in the Cross of Christ, in the Crescent of Islam as in the abstract sound of the sacred Om or Ik Omkaar.

At the basic level, we pray for our wellbeing, for success in an enterprise or for experiencing spiritual delight. But at a more sophisticated level, we may seek guidance to go from asutt or Untruth (the mono-vision of Truth) to Truth (recognition of its multiple appearances).